"Moderation in all things"
About this Quote
A line this tidy only survives if it can be weaponized in opposite directions, and "Moderation in all things" is built for that double duty. Terence, a Roman playwright adapting Greek New Comedy for a city obsessed with status, appetite, and self-control, isn’t handing down a tranquil wellness slogan. He’s staging a social technology: restraint as performance, moderation as a way to stay in bounds without admitting you have bounds.
The intent is practical, almost managerial. In comedy, excess is the engine of plot: the spendthrift son, the jealous lover, the swaggering soldier. A call to moderation isn’t anti-pleasure; it’s anti-chaos. It’s the line that keeps desire from blowing up the household and, by extension, the civic order Rome liked to imagine as domesticated and rational. Said onstage, it flatters the audience into thinking they are the sane ones watching other people’s appetites run wild.
The subtext is more pointed: moderation is often less a moral truth than a class-coded privilege. Only people with options can afford to recommend temperance; for everyone else, restraint is just scarcity with better branding. In Roman life, that tension was everywhere: elites preaching simplicity while living amid conquest-fueled abundance.
Context sharpens the irony. Comedy doesn’t punish excess because it’s sinful; it punishes it because it’s embarrassing, costly, and contagious. Terence’s maxim works because it sounds like virtue while operating like crowd control, giving a society that fears disorder a portable excuse to police emotion, spending, sex, even speech. The brilliance is its flexibility: it can counsel balance or shut someone up.
The intent is practical, almost managerial. In comedy, excess is the engine of plot: the spendthrift son, the jealous lover, the swaggering soldier. A call to moderation isn’t anti-pleasure; it’s anti-chaos. It’s the line that keeps desire from blowing up the household and, by extension, the civic order Rome liked to imagine as domesticated and rational. Said onstage, it flatters the audience into thinking they are the sane ones watching other people’s appetites run wild.
The subtext is more pointed: moderation is often less a moral truth than a class-coded privilege. Only people with options can afford to recommend temperance; for everyone else, restraint is just scarcity with better branding. In Roman life, that tension was everywhere: elites preaching simplicity while living amid conquest-fueled abundance.
Context sharpens the irony. Comedy doesn’t punish excess because it’s sinful; it punishes it because it’s embarrassing, costly, and contagious. Terence’s maxim works because it sounds like virtue while operating like crowd control, giving a society that fears disorder a portable excuse to police emotion, spending, sex, even speech. The brilliance is its flexibility: it can counsel balance or shut someone up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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